Alwaght- Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas set Hamas' disbarment as a precondition for the reconciliation between the Ramallah-based Fatah party and Hamas resistance movement that governs Gaza Strip.
In an interview to Egyptian news station CBC, Mahmoud Abbas said Monday when Hamas joins the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella group for Palestinian factions, the movement will be required to accept the principles of the organization and its decisions.
“We, in the West Bank, operate according to a single law and a single authority,” said Abbas adding “I order to arrest anyone who holds weapons that is not under the auspices of the law, even if they are Fatah members, and that is what is meant to be.”
While Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami al-Hamdallah is in Gaza negotiating steps towards reconciliation between the mainstream Fatah party and Hamas resistance movement, Mahmoud Abbas remarks are deemed counterproductive, as Hamas has already emphasized that it will not even broach the subject of dismantling its military wing during the reconciliation negotiations.
The reconciliation process began when Hamas delegation met Egyptian diplomats in Cairo late last month, and declared the resistance movement decided it would dissolve its administrative committee and expressed its willingness to reconcile with its rival, the Fatah political party, after a decade of division.
Hamas has been the de-facto ruler in the Gaza Strip since 2007 after the party defeated President Mahmoud Abbas' long-dominant Fatah party in parliamentary elections.
Hamas then pushed Fatah out of Gaza in a bloody conflict, when the latter refused to recognize the result of the vote. Hamas and Fatah have ruled the Gaza Strip and the West Bank respectively ever since, and multiple attempts at reconciliation have since failed for several reasons.
The latest attempt in 2014 was thwarted when Israel launched a 51-day war against Gaza.
Hamas' control over security and its nature as an anti-occuaption movement have also constituted an obstacle for the West Bank-based Fatah, which cooperates with Israeli regime on security-related matters, as laid out in the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and 1995 between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel.
Tel Aviv regime has imposed an all-out siege on Gaza controls Gaza access, except at the Egyptian border, and controls all crossings between Gaza and the West Bank. Egypt has contributed to land, air, and sea blockade on the enclave. The Israeli authorities have kept the Gaza Strip mostly closed in the past two decades and especially since 2007.
Palestinian Authority has also compounded the misery of the Gazans through “punitive measures” which it has imposed to squeeze Hamas and force it to relinquish the control of the enclave.
Among a series of economic sanctions has been the reduction of payments for Gaza electricity, which has prompted Israel to drastically cut power supply to the territory of 1.8 million residents to less than four hours a day.
